Online libraries make complete sense. They seem as obvious a
development from electronic publishing as phone payment is from PayPal. In
spite of that, and not unlike phone payment, they are still underdeveloped and
almost not advertised.
I am writing these lines from the café where I usually take
my morning expresso. Today I forgot my wallet. I have therefore no card and no
cash. At first I shrugged it off. The place has wi-fi connection. I would
simply download the Android Pay app and use it to navigate through my day on a
sea of virtual money. It turns out that my bank is not a participant. Were it
not for my Parisian habit of always going to the same place, every morning, and
always ordering the same thing (single expresso please, no sugar), were it not for
my waiter’s Parmesan habit of trusting people (yeah course you go ahead, you
pay me at lunch, or tomorrow) I would be sitting outside in total caffeine deprivation.
There is still a long way till electronic devices replace human contact.
Thus for online libraries. You would think that, at a time
where your prime minister can find out in a click where you were, what you ate,
what you read and what you said to whom two hours ago, your corner library
would be able to rent any book ever digitized with the same ease. Alas, libraries
offering such a service are still few and their offer meager. Put it on the
lack of public funding, I suppose. Unless it is due to a gap in public funding,
or, maybe, to public funding insufficiency. Or perhaps it is because the
government does not give a flying duck (sorry, predictive text) about educating
its own population. Because they are so busy playing their game that they have
forgotten that their primary role is to run the country with, at heart, the
interest of its inhabitants. Or (did I say this already?) for want of public
funding.
Lewisham library had Kate Atkinson’s Case Histories though, right in the Mystery / Thrillers category. Working
in IT, I understand that a system can be so stupid that each book need to
belong to a category. In which case I would advise that someone create a “No
Category” category, for Atkinson does not even try to respect the codes of the
genre where she has been shoved. The resolution of her three mysteries is
treated with slight. True, she keeps the suspense till the end. But Jackson, her
“investigator” (one even hesitates to call him that) does not find out much, to
say the least. His highest merit is to meet the right people, by chance. He
finds Michelle’s daughter by luck. In Laura’s case, he happens to meet the one friend
whom, in eight years, the official investigation has neglected to interrogate
properly, and who happens to know the murderer. The same Jackson Brodie owes the
resolution of Olivia’s mystery to the same combination of luck and criminal
negligence from the police, which in thirty-five years did not conduct a
thorough search of the immediate vicinity. Luck also puts him in Binky Rains's path, leading to a fairy-tale ending.
Atkinson’s point is obviously not about the cases resolution.
There is a “Pepe Carvalho” manner in Jackson's disillusion as to his capacity
to bring anything new to light. Atkinson’s point is, like in her more recent Behind The Scenes At The Museum (see my
review in April), about women’s condition in the patriarchal society of today’s
England. As in Behind The Scenes, men
are pushed away from the main stage: they run from wives and children, they
die, they spend their time in male occupations such as drinking, betting or hunting,
they lock themselves away from the society of women, in churches or in their
home studies – however, as in Behind The
Scenes, they pull the strings of everybody’s life around them. Victor
abuses his daughters and hides the youngest one’s disappearance, indifferent to
his family’s mourning. Laura is murdered out of concupiscence. Jackson’s sister
is raped and strangled. Michelle is driven to extreme acts to escape what her
surrounding wants her to become – the wife of a farmer at twenty, the wife of
an aristocrat twenty years later.
This is not to say that, in Atkinson’s universe, men are
evil creatures. Jackson is a lovely and insecure character, caring very much
for his daughter and still in love with a wife who left him. Taylor is the best
father on earth. Even Keith, Michelle’s first husband, is shown as a good person.
But the social model is so strong, society so rigid that women are left trapped
in their role, sometimes with their consent, as is the case for Binky Rains, this racist,
colonialist remnant of Victorian England. They are denied the right to think,
feel, desire for and by themselves. Amputated from their sexuality they are
mutilated souls whose only shelter is in madness, reclusion, exile, suicide or,
like Amelia, in reprobation of her sister’s sexual appetites. I could only cry
for them and feel shame for what I am, a male, an oppressor.
However, Kate Atkinson writes lightly and loves happy
endings. If not for that, her novel would have left me hopeless in the face of reality
and doubtful that things would ever change. As in all good thrillers. Fortunately,
she shrugs at the genre’s rules and laughs in the midst of the misery she
exposes. And so, I hope.
